A couple weeks ago we shared our beta development process. And If you’ve joined our beta program, you must be thinking, “when is SourceTree going to get to step 4: Early Access?” To elaborate a bit, an Early Access build is a production-ready build which has been tested by you, our Trusted Testers. We want to give you a heads up that SourceTree 2.2.5 for OS X and 1.9.1.1 for Windows will be available for download at www.sourcetreeapp.com in the coming days. Here are a few things to look out for in the update. The following will be available in OS X first, with Windows soon to follow later.

Attic removed – While working on this upgrade we found that hg-attic, the Mercurial extension SourceTree used for shelving changes, was no longer compatible. SourceTree has now migrated to Mercurial’s built-in shelving implementation. Unfortunately, the two formats are incompatible and this means hg-attic and its contents are no longer supported in SourceTree. However, existing hg-attic shelves are not lost and are listed on the side bar under a new heading “SHELVED BY HG-ATTIC”. They are treated as standard patches with limited functionality to view, import or delete. We recommend applying any hg-attic shelves you have in your repos as soon as possible or convert to the new format by importing and creating a new shelve.

No support for hgattic extension – From the next release onwards, v2.2.5 on OS X and v.1.9.2 on Windows, SourceTree will not support hgattic extension and recommend versions of Mercurial 3.7.3 or higher .

Embedded Git 2.8.1 on OS X build – Many of you might have seen errors which include the path “Users/mbasaralusrinivasa/workspace/git-scm/git-274/…”. Well, this is the path at which we installed Git 2.7.4 and was bundled with SourceTree 2.2.4. We had to address the Git security issues quickly and since an officially maintained build of Git was not available at the time, we built it ourselves. We later realized that there were some binaries that referenced the local install path which was visible in some error logs. To fix this, we bundled the (now) official Git 2.8.1 binaries.

If you notice any issues or bugs in the Early Access build, please feel free to file them at jira.atlassian.com. And if you haven’t already, please join our beta program to get access to a ton of features before they are made generally available.